“We showed them (the network folks) five of the old ‘Tom and Jerrys’ and they laughed so hard they had tears in their eyes,” Barbera told the Associated Press at the time. The cartoon’s creators, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, had trouble pitching it to broadcast networks in 1975, after they retrieved rights from MGM. And in “Mouse Cleaning,” Tom uses his “blackface” to trick Mammy Two Shoes. “Casanova Cat” features Tom wooing a glamorous female feline by darkening Jerry’s face with cigar smoke and making him do a minstrel dance. In 2013, two episodes were pulled from the second installment of Warner Brothers’ Golden Collection because they featured Tom and Jerry “blacked up.”įans thought the collection would feature every episode of the comedy since its creation, but “Casanova Cat” and “Mouse Cleaning,” two episodes from 19 with obvious race references that had previously been censored on broadcast television, were cut from the collection. It’s hardly the first time the beloved cat and mouse frenemies have run into controversy. “The advisory is really meant to warn parents that the cartoon may include things like smoking or the black housekeeper that they might have to explain to their children.” “ should be showcasing ‘Tom and Jerry’ among classic movies in a way that gives them cultural context,” he said.

“Amazon seems to have forgotten that ‘Tom and Jerry’ was made for adults as much as it was for children,” Beck told The Daily Beast. Meanwhile, British cultural commentator and sociology professor Frank Furedi declared Amazon’s warning “empty-headed” and excoriated a kind of “false piousness” and culture of censorship that “seems to be sweeping cultural life.”Ĭartoon historian Jerry Beck agrees. Another “watched Tom and Jerry since the 60s this is the 1st time I’ve ever heard the R word in relation to it. “I loved Tom and Jerry as a kid and it never made me think poorly of ethnic minorities or want to smoke cigars,” one tweeted. So while Amazon has recently added “Tom and Jerry” to its video streaming service, they made sure to include a racism disclaimer: a warning that “Tom and Jerry” contains “some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society.”Ĭharacters like Mammy Two Shoes “were wrong then and are wrong today,” the warning reads, incensing some fans of the seven-time Academy-Award winning show. You’d be hard-pressed to find a character like Mammy Two Shoes, a heavyset black maid whose face is obscured in all but one “Tom and Jerry” episode, on the Disney Channel today. But as with any show that was created in the 1940s, some of its tropes could be deemed politically incorrect or offensive today. The premise of “Tom and Jerry,” the 75-year-old madcap slapstick cartoon about a feuding cat and mouse, is as innocuous as it is endlessly entertaining.

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